Tag Archives: Belcourt Theatre

Sophisticated pop-rock songsmith Aimee Mann comes to the Belcourt Theatre (2102 Belcourt Ave., 383-9140) on Monday, Sept. 27, in the midst of an intimate string of shows she’s playing with a three-piece band that includes long-time collaborators Paul Bryan and Jamie Edwards.

In addition to fan favorites from the catalog, Mann will be previewing bits from her upcoming project: a musical based on her 2005 album The Forgotten Arm.

The show starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are $35 in advance, $40 the day of the show.

Mary Gauthier hates to use the word “healing.” It’s a fit, but a cheap fit, and the wordsmith in her grimaces at such things.

“Writing and singing these songs, you’d think it would be a bummer,” she said, and she’s correct. “These songs” are the ones that make up The Foundling, an autobiographical song cycle about Gauthier’s experiences as an orphan. (She’ll play songs from that album Thursday night at the Belcourt.)

Those experiences aren’t limited to childhood: As an adult, Gauthier hired a private detective to locate her birth mother, and she eventually contacted the woman, who rejected any notion of a meeting.

“It sounds sad,” she continued, sitting outside a coffee shop on a sunny Nashville day. “But it actually makes me feel better. I play a song, look out at the audience and see people nodding, like, ‘Yeah, me too.’ People who have blood family are going, ‘I know that feeling.’”Continue reading →

Sophisticated pop/rock songsmith Aimee Mann will bring her fall tour to Nashville's Belcourt Theatre on September 28. The Nashville date is part of an intimate string of shows she's playing with a three-piece band that includes long-time collaborators Paul Bryan and Jamie Edwards. Tickets are $35 in advance and $40 the day of the show.

On stage where I was, there was the distinct wafting of the partly sewage, partly chemical odor of the Porta-potties. And then there's just the whole craziness of the vibe, where people have been up for days and everyone's sweating, and a lot of people are super-drunk right in the middle of the day. It was a really fun free-for-all.

(Read the rest of our Aimee Mann interview.) We're betting the vibe might be slightly more subdued at her Belcourt show, but it should be an entertaining evening all the same.

Marty Stuart’s Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions album hits stores on Tuesday (August 24), and it’s as good a representation of Stuart’s art and soul as anything he’s done.

He recorded it at the historic studio where Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Jim Reeves and so many others made classic hits, he wrote songs that evoke country music’s history and its future, with lyrics that touch on Stuart’s past. And he brought in not only his Fabulous Superlatives band but also legendary figures such as his wife, Connie Smith, and veteran steel guitar great Ralph Mooney.

“Moon is my favorite musician,” Stuart said. “And he’s playing great. Why would you throw away a Picasso? An eternal gift is an eternal gift.”

Stuart and his Superlatives (Kenny Vaughan, Paul Martin and Harry Stinson) play an album-release show on Wednesday, Aug. 25 at the Belcourt Theatre.

What else is up in Stuart’s world? As usual, nearly everything. He’s producing a Connie Smith album, he’s planning a third season of RFD TV’s The Marty Stuart Show, he’s featured in The Art of Country Music: The Marty Stuart Collection exhibit at New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and he’s put together the new "Marty Selects" section at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.Continue reading →

Kathy Troccoli has spent 28 years building a successful career in contemporary Christian music. The singer has sold 2 million albums and logged 17 No. 1 hits. But when the opportunity came along to show off her voice in a new way, Troccoli couldn’t say no.

In June, she released Heartsongs, a collection of past- and present-day pop standards like “In My Life,” “Dance with Me,” “Up on the Roof” and “What a Wonderful World.” Thursday (August 19), Troccoli plans to perform the pop songs at 7 p.m. at the Belcourt Theatre. It will be the first time she’s performed the music live in Nashville.

“I hope they love it as much as I do,” Troccoli said. “I’m excited about singing these songs for everyone. I’ve loved this music for years.”

Tickets for Troccoli’s show are $45-$30 plus fees. Groups are priced at $30-$20 plus fees. For tickets for more information, call 383-9140.

Reunion shows are so often about familiarity and remembrance. Fans pony up big money to watch dinosaur rock bands replicate decades-old doings.

But Monday night at the Belcourt Theatre, the Desert Rose Band’s reunion concert was much more about renewal than replication. Enlivened by guest visits from Emmylou Harris and Brad Paisley, the Desert Rose Band’s original lineup presented a reunion show that existed fully in the moment, bolstered, not shackled, by memory.

The clumsy moments may have been the dearest. Harris and bandleader Chris Hillman fumbled the opening of “Sin City,” a song Hillman wrote with Harris’ mentor, the late Gram Parsons. But the awkward start gave way to a harmonious, waltz-time wonder as the band got in sync.

Later, Hillman was so enamored of guitarist John Jorgenson’s warp-speed solo on “The Price I Pay” that he forgot to reenter for the final chorus. He returned to the microphone with an astonished look on his face, as if he’d been jerked from the audience onto the stage.

Then again, some of the night’s finer moments were far from clumsy. Paisley, a child of 14 when the Desert Rose Band first hit the charts in 1987 with “Ashes of Love,” played the searing “Hello Trouble” solo with Jorgenson, in harmony. Steel player Jay Dee Maness delivered a lovely, perfectly executed solo on “Together Again,” a song originally recorded by Buck Owens in a version that featured a legendary solo from another ex-Desert Rose Band member, Tom Brumley.Continue reading →

By the late 1980s, while virtuoso guitarist Jorgenson played for hit-making country group The Desert Rose Band, those letters were plentiful, and most often came from adult females inquiring about matters beyond music.

“This one was different,” Jorgenson said, recalling a letter he received more than 20 years ago, postmarked from West Virginia. “It was written in pencil, on notebook paper, talking about, ‘The guitar part you did on this song was cool.’ Plus, I’d never met anyone named ‘Paisley’ before.”

These days, the Paisley fellow — first name, Brad — says hearing the Desert Rose Band changed his life, and we know this because he has become one of country music’s biggest stars. Jorgenson gave him a Desert Rose-used guitar in 2004, at a party where Paisley celebrated selling five million albums filled with guitar licks that are indelibly influenced by Jorgenson’s chiming, twanging, chattering electric style.

On Monday, August 9, nearly two decades after Jorgenson left Desert Rose, he and the rest of the group’s original lineup (Chris Hillman, Herb Pedersen, Jay Dee Maness, Bill Bryson and Steve Duncan) will play a reunion concert at the Belcourt Theatre. On Tuesday the 10th, they’ll play the Grand Ole Opry. Neither show will be a celebration of anything approaching five million albums sold, as the band’s 10 Top 20 country hits from 1987 to 1990 did not spawn such high commerce.

What was spawned, though, was of musical significance. In his time with the California-based, Nashville-marketed Desert Rose Band, Jorgenson brought a guitar sensibility that remains much-imitated in Music City. Lead singer Chris Hillman — who had once been booed at the Grand Ole Opry as a member of shaggy rock-gone-country band The Byrds — helped connect the Nashville mainstream to the hard-charging west coast country-rock styles of The Byrds and another one of his earlier bands, the Flying Burrito Brothers.Continue reading →

A collaborator by nature, Scott wrote each of the album’s 20 songs, and he played every instrument on every track. The songs are a roughly chronological chronicling of 30 years of real-life relationships.

“This record is pretty scary to me in many ways,” Scott said. “I figure that’s the job description; it’s what I’m supposed to do. I guess it might not be courage. Could be stupidity, or that terrible word: vanity. But to me it’s what I had to do. It’s an internal approach, rather than me thinking of clever things to say.”

Saturday morning, a Country Music Hall of Famer tried his gracious best to explain to his most ardent fans why his new songs aren't often played on the radio.

"There's no artist that this didn't happen to," said Vince Gill, speaking to a Belcourt Theatre auditorium-full of fan club members. "Not one. Well, maybe George Strait... Anyway, people like different things. My grandfather said, 'If people all liked the same thing, everybody'd be hitting on your grandma."

Gill's "Young Man's Town" ballad was an acknowledgment of his passing of the mainstream baton, but he's been making plenty of music. Thus far this year, he has produced an album for LeAnn Rimes, collaborated with wife Amy Grant, Johnny Mathis, Jimmy Webb and others and worked on new songs of his own. Saturday, he was in fine voice as he sang songs including "What You Give Away" and a new Ashley Monroe co-write called "If I Die."

He’s managing to pry himself from that sort of scenery long enough to embark on a North American tour in support of El Turista, a dreamy, Latin-inspired pop album sung in equal parts English and Spanish.

That tour comes through Rouse's former hometown on Tuesday, May 25 ,for a show at the Belcourt Theatre (2102 Belcourt Ave., 383-9140). Showtime is 8 p.m., and tickets are $20.